Pakistan works to joining the CreativeCommons network

Soon after the launch of the CreativeCommons.org licensing programme for India, to the west, neighbouring Pakistan is working to get the same moving too.

Discussions over this issue came up in Lahore, Pakistan. recently. During a two-day workshop entitled "Towards an Open Information Society in Pakistan" jointly organised by non-profit organisations Bellanet-Bellasap and Bytesforall Network Pakistan to be specific. This encounter was done in collaboration with the South Asia Partnership-PK, SAP-Nepal and SAP-International.

"Issues of copyrights, intellectual property regimes (IPR) and alternate forms of IPR are not only valid but it is time that we took up the Creative Commons drafting activity," said Fouad Riaz Bajwa of the BytesForAll network in Pakistan.

Campaigners there expect to have the first draft-ported-copyright-license in the Urdu national language ready for public discussion well before the iCommons Summit and the Internet Governance Forum Rio meetings in November this year.

Lawyer Catharina Maracke of the global Creative Commons network has also begun work to build partners on the license porting process.

Creative Commons is an alternate form of IPR that provides creative people to share, reuse, and remix intellect and creativity -legally.

Creative Commons provides free tools for authors, artists, and educators to mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry.

Their tools change "All Rights Reserved" into "Some Rights Reserved", and the creator is allowed to decide what rights to retain and what to give out.

Creative Commons describes itself as a non-profit organisation. They say: "Everything we do – including the software we create – is free."

The proposed legal project lead is barrister Zahid U. Jamil of law firm Jamil And Jamil in Karachi. Jamil is a renowned ICT policy expert and advisor to the UN-GAID (Global Alliance For ICT And Development). He was among those who drafted the Electronic Transactions Ordinance of Pakistan.